GHANA NEWS AGENCY
Security professionals in Ghana and their counterparts from U.S. Africa Command held a forum to better prepare for disasters. The event focused on the capabilities of the military, police, fire service, National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), the ambulance service and others to respond to mass-casualty events, particularly earthquakes.
Speaking at the event, Ghanaian Minister of the Interior Ambrose Dery said preparation is essential because an earthquake could wipe out decades’ worth of development.
“Apart from massive loss of human life, critical social and economic infrastructure is lost,” he said. “It may take several years for a less advanced and resilient nation like Ghana to fully recover from such an event.”
Ghana’s last destructive earthquake — magnitude 6.4 — hit in 1939, killing at least 17 people in the capital city, Accra. Today, the toll could be much worse. Accra’s population has increased from 77,000 to more than 3 million since then, Dery said.
Eric Nana Agyeman-Prempeh, director general of NADMO, said Ghana continues to receive support from U.S. Africa Command in emergency operations training and simulation exercises for flood and fire. “We agreed to move on to hold a full-scale simulation exercise this year,” he said. “The capacity and capability to respond to a low-probability but high-consequence event has never been tested, so an earthquake scenario has been chosen to test our readiness to respond effectively.”
U.S. Lt. Col. Mathew Holmes said the forum would help the U.S. better understand the Ghanaians’ process to effectively support them should a disaster strike.
“It is a way for us to both talk about our capabilities and how America can swiftly help in the area of transportation and relief response,” he said.
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